ATI is a Canadian company and anybody having issues with their drivers is incompetent and unable to follow simple directions.
Seriously, when they say "UNINSTALL ALL PREVIOUS ATI DRIVER PRODUCTS", and you go right ahead and install your shiny new catalyst over your old- ATI Mach 2, and it doesn't work, so you phone up support, you tell them the story, and they say that they'll put you on hold while you look into it, what do you think they're really doing? They're either laughing or crying, because their dealing with a person completely incapable of reading simple instructions.
Here's the thing, if I was presupposed to take previous experience then I would NOT be using a nvidia at all. having, not 3, not 4, NOT 5, but 6 separate graphics cards all unfailingly Blue-Screen in the display driver says nothing for the stability of either the nvidia chipset or the reference or OEM drivers.
But guess what? I am. Admittedly the Nvidia was the only good AGP card at the store, but aside from that I also realized that there is more to getting the video to work then either the video drivers and the video card. A lot of computers have this thing called a "motherboard". It acts like the egg that holds the omelette together. Now, if you use bad eggs, you don't say, "I think this sausage is bad" you say, "these eggs taste like crap".
Why people have to pass judgement on an entire company based in their bad experience which stemmed directly as a result of their inability to read the INSTRUCTIONS IN CAPITAL LETTERS is beyond me, perhaps
they thought the capitalization meant it wasn't important. Either way, it of course is not their fault, because
they didn't make the graphics card, they only installed a new set of drivers over an old set, failed to follow proper ECD precautions and also didn't leave it properly seated. I mean, if that's not foul play by ATI, I don't know what is
On the topic of Drivers, ATI has ALWAYS had better drivers then Nvidia. the only caveat is that you need to uninstall the old version. this is a step far too many people forget. And they blame ATI for it.
Additionally, ATI is a Canadian company that employs Canadian workers, and unlike Paudashlake I applaud my countrymen for their successes in a typically U.S and japan dominated field of electronics, especially for their ability to stay afloat in the ubiquitous and constantly changing world of graphics hardware, regardless of how low their customers IQ is.
Actually, this is a similar issue to that that Microsoft faces every friggin' release.
people say something like:
"program X no longer works on Windows Y. Windows Y sucks"
without realizing, or even knowing, that Program X
never worked in the first place. FAR too many programs find some clever way of doing something by either relying on undocumented behaviour or depending on specific path locations. (windows 2000's default windows dir was C:\WINNT- guess how many programs that assumed C:\WINDOWS worked? Now guess how many people blamed W2K.). Of course- Microsoft changes this undocumented behaviour, and changes the implementation of their public APIs to match. If a program is written
properly and following instructions provided by the MSDN, it runs fine on Vista. LUA was a consideration even with XP, and as long as a developer understood LUA and respected it on XP, their program would be able to deal with UAC.
But no- none of this was relevant.
Microsoft was the company that literally ended up finding and fixing the bug. They basically asked the companies, *censored* were you thinking? Take note that these are BIG ticket programs, like Adobe photoshop, not some dinky little 8-th grader's Batch script). Why would MS care? Because they know what would happen otherwise.
1. person uses windows 98. purchases program X, which uses undocumented behaviour.
2. person upgrades to XP.
3. program X stops working. XP sucks.
same deal with Vista.
To summarize what I said above- STFU.
